10/04/1999 @ 12:00AM

Greens and genes

YOU CAN TRUST THEIR CHEESE or their government, but when it comes to the French, you can’t trust both. Same with most of their Euro-neighbors, from Birmingham to Berlin.

The French–who cheerfully swallow anything that hops, slithers, creeps, crawls or reeks, so long as it does so on native French soil–are resolved to ban Idaho’s beef and Florida’s tomatoes. The American farm’s growth hormones and engineered genes aren’t healthy, you see. Germany’s greens are equally determined to protect the biological purity of the volks diet. The British–who, until recently, fed offal to their cattle–now recoil at the thought of feeding snippets of U.S.-crafted DNA to their rutabagas.

What Europe’s epicures demand, of course, is the good old farmers’ market–pesticide-free produce, straight from the fields, fertilized the old-fashioned way. Meat and poultry from a pasture, not a factory. Genes assembled by nature, not man. No plastics or preservatives. Pure and healthy. Efficient and green.

Make that poppycock and bunkum. A century ago, “pure” and “healthy” were indeed synonymous. Food “adulteration” was almost always bad. But that’s no longer so. Growth hormones and recombined genes produce leaner meat and more nutritious crops, at lower prices. The health benefits far outweigh any imaginable risks that hormone residues or jiggered genes might present, especially since all the scientific evidence confirms that they present none at all. Pesticides permit the cultivation of crop varieties that contain lower levels of carcinogens than plants ordinarily produce themselves, in their own all-natural efforts to ward off bacteria, fungi and insects. Preservatives and packaging reduce spoilage, which really is a serious hazard in the food supply. No student of Darwin can possibly believe that nature’s chemical and genetic recipes, from soup to nuts, just happen to be optimized for the health of a single species–our own.

How about “efficient and green”? For years the granolas have demanded efficient cars, refrigerators and lightbulbs. Some would now have us believe that organic farming is efficient, too. Others simply maintain that you just can’t beat nature when it comes to the efficiency of rice or sugar beets.

But you can, as the fiercely competitive agricultural industry well knows. That’s why it bioengineers high-yield crops, piles on fertilizers, sprays on pesticides and injects growth hormones–the upshot is more food from less land. That’s why it adds antioxidants, irradiates and packages in plastic–cutting spoilage boosts efficiency. This does at least as much good for the environment as improving the gas mileage of the truck that hauls the food to market.

Raw nature, by contrast, isn’t efficient at all. Why should it be? A mouse has good reason to forage efficiently, but it has no reason to make itself efficiently digestible by a fox. A tree does its best to transform sunlight and carbon dioxide efficiently into wood and oxygen; a fungus does its best to transform the wood right back into water and carbon dioxide, efficiently, too; so the tree must redirect some of its own efficiency to curtailing the parasite’s. This is about as efficient, all in all, as two diesel engines guzzling fuel and going nowhere in the tractor pull at a county fair.

Being wrong about high-tech agriculture makes opponents wrong about the most important issue on the environmental landscape. Green plants of the sort found wild in nature are very inefficient at turning sunlight into human food. As a result, traditional agriculture is the single human activity most responsible for leveling forests and crowding out the planet’s wilderness. High technology shrinks that footprint. True greens embrace it.

But then, neither health nor the environment really matter with something as culturally fundamental as food. Food taboos help define every exclusionary culture and faith. Science defines certain proscriptions, too: Some things really are unfit to eat. The strictly scientific taboos, however, are culture-free. They’re the only ones that can be reconciled with a commitment to free trade.

The more je-ne-sais-quoi faith you have in the mystical perfection of French food, the less you can trust a French signature on a trade treaty..